Coming close behind the announcement of a two-year low in share prices, Time Warner is expected to launch yet another plan to save the ailing service provider, America On-Line .  The new plan, the fourth in five years, is to give away the email and web services components of AOL for free. This plan hopes to recapture some of the market share taken by rival free mail and web services such as Google and MySpace .  While AOL will be giving away a large portion of its service for fr...

Sometimes you wonder if people actually think about what they're doing before they click send on an email.  NetworkWorld is reporting on one PR firm that doesn't appear to have any clue about the companies it represents.  Rocket Science , a PR company serving Singlefin , a provider of email, IM and web filtering for places like Juno and NetZero, decided to drum up some publicity and sent emails to eleven different staffers at NetworkWorld, instead of sending it to their spam or s...

The big news on the Internet today is the attack on Netscape.com .  As friction between AOL's new social bookmarking effort, the retooled Netscape.com, and Digg.com increases, it appears that today a rather major line has  been crossed.  Hackers, exploiting an XSS vulnerability, modified the Netscape site to throw pop-up alerts at visitors with pro-Digg comments, and in some cases even auto-forwarded users to Digg.com Netscape announced earlier this afternoon that the vul...

Tired of getting countless messages in your inbox telling you you've won the Nigerian lotto, or that certain parts of your anatomy could be made to wow your friends and family?  Many of us spend hours a week managing junk email, deleting it, updating filters and just generally grumbling about all the stupid stuff that makes it to our inboxes.  Well, there's one computer artist out there who managed to make a purse out of a sow's ear. Alex Dragulescu, a Romanian-born computer artist, no...

Earlier this month, the annual Shareware Industry Conference announced the top shareware titles of 2006.  Stardock walked away with the People's Choice Award for "Best Vertical Market Program or Utility" and was nominated for "Best Desktop Enhancement" in the closed-voting Shareware Industry Award. The Peoples Choice Award is voted on by the users of shareware titles on sites such as CNET, Simtel and Tucows.  WindowBlinds was also nominated for Best Desktop Enhancement in 2004. ...

From the creators of the Kazaa file sharing utility and Skype , Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, comes a new video distribution system.  Still in the early stages, the "Venice Project" was announced on Sunday in a BusinessWeek.com article .  What sets this effort apart from previous ones is that Zenstrom and Friis are reportedly courting major television networks to use the service as their primary online distribution method.  This would put them in indirect competition...

Another week, another poll.  Last week's poll asked what new content you would most like to see come to WinCustomize.com.  Due to technical difficulties, many of you were unable to vote, and we only saw 105 total votes in the 7 days the poll was up.  For those of you who were able to cast your ballot, here's how it all turned out: What new content would you like to see on WinCustomize.com?   Tutorials 46 43.8%   Co...

Microsoft today announced the beta launch of the new Windows Live Gallery site.  Windows Live Gallery will be the central site for users to find gadgets, MSN messenger utilities and extensions to personalize the various Windows Live services that are to launch along side of Windows Vista early next year. To see a video preview, go here .

After a week of rumors, AMD today announced that it has plans to purchase graphics card maker ATI and merge the two companies.  The value of the transaction is reported to be in the neighborhood of $5.4 billion (USD).  This marks a significant departure for AMD from its past business practices of focusing exclusively on building processors.  In addition to the merger deal, AMD announced that it would be cutting prices on its current processor line by nearly 50% in reaction t...

Google has filed a change in it's report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission stating that it's 2006 spending growth will out-pace it's expected revenue growth as it works to grow infrastructure and provide increased compensation to its employees.  This is perhaps the first financial stumble for Google since it's stellar IPO.  It says this makes future profitability much harder to predict. As of this writing, Google (GOOG) shares are at $375.91, down $1.03 (0.27%) for the ...

With the launch of the new Stardock website, Object Desktop 2007 and Windows Vista just around the corner, the time has come to kick it up a notch, so to speak, here on WinCustomize, the premier online community for all things UI customization.  A lot of work is going on behind the scenes right now for WinCustomize.com.  You've already seen the new forums, and the increase of activity here on the front news page, but we have even more great stuff in store for you...

How's this for a critical security update?  Turns out that the MS06-040 patch, released Tuesday, is of such a critical nature that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is urging users, in an official notice , to apply the patch as quickly as possible. From the press release: "Windows Operating Systems users are encouraged to avoid delay in applying this security patch.  Attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems routinely occur within 24 hours of the release...

BetaNews is reporting that the University of California and Google today struck a deal to add all public domain books in the University's collection to Google's ever-growing book-scanning project.  This expansion, pulling in books from over 100 libraries in the state-wide University system, is the largest Google has seen yet. The Google Book Search project is perhaps one of the most controversial of all of the search and advertising company's various projects, drawing criticism and...

Since the tech world is largely quiet aside from the flurry of Apple related news following the WWDC keynote yesterday, I'm going to share possibly one of the stranger technology news stories I've run across lately.  It's an article on CNN.Com today entitled "Couple-surfing: 'Love me, love my blog'". The basic premise is that as we become more hooked on technology, become more at home with blogging and instant messaging, that it has begun to move into some of the most intimate parts of o...

BBC News reported yesterday that Internet search giant Google has struck a $900 million deal with News Corp. to provide search and advertising for the popular MySpace social networking site.  The deal says that starting in October, MySpace users will be using Google to search for friends and groups within the site.  Also expect text-based adwords advertisements to appear along side those search results. Google is currently the king of the Internet search market space, and Ne...